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Bondax are kind of cool

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:33:31 -0500

So I asked them some questions for DIY.

What do you think of this surge in the popularity of DJing? It seems everyone I know is buying decks…
DJing was always going to go in this direction as everything digital takes over. It’s interesting for us because we took quite a bit of shit for DJing when we started simply because it wasn’t the ‘cool’ thing to be doing where we live. Fashions come and go, electronic music could be the most utterly uncool thing in 5 years but for now we don’t see a problem in people DJing, it’s all good competition.

You’re working on an album - right? How’s it sounding in comparison to your other stuff?
Yep we are busy with the album at the moment. All that is being kept under wraps for now but we’ll have new music for you very shortly…

You went to the US last year, and I’ve heard you’re going back this year. Does your British dance music inspired sound translate well over there?
Yeah, we feel truly lucky and it gives you a new outlook on your own music. You see people react differently to different songs. It’s also mad to experience new cultures, it furthers your music and more importantly, yourself.

http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/neu/bondax-electronic-music-could-be-the-most-uncool-thing-in-5-years/

VICE

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:10:48 -0500

I wrote something up for them on this investigation into Australian sport.

Photo

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 02:30:02 -0500

Two Strangers in the Dark

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 08:42:17 -0500

Some more words from me, for DIY. This time, it’s about my joint-favourite (sorry…) album of 2012: Wild Nothing’s Nocturne.

So, a guy makes music by himself. He works under a title that mirrors his sonic ability to dabble between the overstated and understated. In the end, he crafts something that could only be like ‘Nocturne’. On a record that’s a proud pastiche of every 1980s genre that ended in “pop,” Wild Nothing exposes himself completely. His songs reflect the art he loves and the way he feels and the things he sees. It’s so natural, so earnest, that Nocturne comes off as a voyeuristic look at a world – Jack Tatum’s world: You’ll want to sing (alone) and dance (together). You’ll come away inspired, enlightened, and itching to experience a love like paradise.

I was again printed in This is Fake DIY, as I found the new...

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 07:31:45 -0400

I was again printed in This is Fake DIY, as I found the new Dinosaur Jr to be boring.

Parakeet is my baby and Yuck is my mum: Mariko Doi of Parakeet

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 04:17:00 -0400

Since her stint in boy-girl act Levelload, Japanese born Mariko Doi has amassed quite the musical CV. After moving to London, she joined up with the international-flavoured Yuck. After a very well received debut record, an appearance on Jools Holland, and appearances at festivals and stages the world over, Doi has dabbled in something different. Uh, excuse the alliteration. Yeah. So her new band is called Parakeet. There’s her, guitarist Jon Jackson, and James Thomas doing some stuff with the drums (he’s also in the wonderful The History of Apple Pie). I don’t know how to describe their music without resorting to cliche ridden, cringe-inducing music journalism. They play with a fair bit of distortion, Mariko’s vocals are the melodic centrepiece, and their album is going to be as heavy as it is engaging (probably). I sent Mariko some questions a while ago – a long while ago – but I’m only posting this now…

How did Parakeet come about?
I started writing bunch of riffs on bass and we were like a cute version of Trans Am when we stared. Then I guess I always sang in a band, and I’m into songs which have cool melodies and distorted guitars. So I started recording guitars. It was the missing piece for my songs and finally, it made sense.

So when did that all start?
Our early form started about two years ago. But we’ve got to our sound only recently.

How did you meet James then?
He used to play in my old band. After splitting up, I proposed him to start a new band with me. And he said “YES…”

The music sounds abrasive and raw, but certainly melodic. Who do you cite as an influence?
I guess when I mix I listen to the Breeders, Nirvana, Slint, Hot Snakes etc. It’s like Steve Albini type production but musically, I like lots of different sorts of good music – like gentle to hard, minimal to full on. And from all years, I wouldn’t say from all races though, since I’m not familiar with them all, for instance K-pop…

Their debut single “Tomorrow.”

Your first single, “Tomorrow,” what’s that all about?
It’s about the people forgetting and enjoying living this moment of their life because they are so concerned with failure in the future. If you try to foresee how things would turn out too much you’ll spoil the moment.

How would you summarise the rest of the record then?
The noise and romance of the night.

And where was it written and recorded?
We’ve recorded drums recently in a studio in London and I recorded everything else at mine. Some songs were written when I was touring with Yuck. It’s kind of hard to find time and space on the road. I should not stop being creative anytime though.

Yeah, Yuck seems like a pretty full on project. So you’re juggling both Yuck and Parakeet. Do you see one as secondary to the other?
I guess I find them both important to me in a different way. Parakeet is my baby and Yuck is my mum.

How were you feeling when you wrote the material for Parakeet?
I guess I get the creative force from feeling shit or having doubt, disagreement and fascination towards people. I’d like to be expressive of my emotions and aspirations. I don’t want to be pretentious or too in if you know what I mean.

“Paper, Scissors, Stone.” The distortion is still the same, but the tenderness has been turned up… a bit.

What’s up next for Parakeet?
We have got the album recorded and mixed so I’m so excited to release it. Oh before that, we have our debut single coming out on 2nd Apr.

Also we have a guitarist with us now and I cannot wait to play shows. It’s going to be like HAIRRRRR on stage. James needs to grow his hair long like Cousin Itt!

Is there anything else you’d like to add?
We feel really excited about the album and now we are more excited about playing shows. It’s really important to us to communicate with people in this way as well and I think we will be able to grab people’s hearts!

Parakeet on Tumblr
Parakeet on Twitter
Parakeet on… ugh, buy their stuff here.

Talking to Todd (Formerly of I Was a Cub Scout)

Mon, 28 May 2012 05:40:00 -0400

So I guess the less I say about these two, the better. I don’t really listen to them at all these days. But as a 15 to 16 year old guy, these were weirdly life affirming. It’s pretty nostalgic to listen to I Was a Cub Scout. I don’t listen to them anymore, it’s just not my thing, but I sent Todd an email a while ago, and he finally got around to answering the questions. Here they are, unedited, because it’s like, y’know, raw or something.

I was reliving some nostalgia and watched your video for “Pink Squares”. You’d written on a comment. You gave your email address, on the basis that it’s a nostalgic experience to relive IWACS. Do you often think about IWACS?
not as much as i used to but i do still think about it. I have quite mixed feelings about iwacs.

I do sometimes miss performing live, the larger support tours and festivals we did were amazing and i have great feelings thinking over those experiences.

The music and live performances were all i wanted out of music, i had no interest in a career or making lots of money. i just wanted to play music in front of people and hope that they enjoyed it.

I personally have a lot of sentiment toward your band. Your music captured the zeitgeist of my adolescence. I know that there are other people who felt that project summated their feelings and angst. Retrospectively, was that that the biggest accomplishment of IWACS?
i was 16-18 when i wrote all the iwacs stuff. I still felt like a kid i had never had a proper job and had dropped out of college to start touring. Now looking back my feelings are similar as it sums up a time when i was an angst ridden teenager.

I am happy that anyone enjoyed what we were doing.

”Pink Squares”

When you listen back to your old songs, how do you feel?
pleased with what we managed to do at the time. I have not played guitar in about 2 years but i still think i could remember every song. i enjoy a few songs but not all of them, i feel some songs on the album were a little rushed and we could of done a better job given a little longer.

But i quite like worker bees and save your wishes. some other songs too but there probably my favourites.

Raw emotions are evident in the band’s catalogue. And in the life span of the act, it seemed driven by the same thing. What was the best moment you experienced in the band? And what was the absolute worst?
The best moment for me was probably some of the bigger festivals. Both reading and leeds we were happy as a band and quite good friends at this point and it really felt like we were going somewhere. The worst one im not to sure of maybe the end, that broke my heart. Having most of our equipment stolen in america was pretty shit.

“I Hate Nightclubs”

In March, you announced you were bringing back the band single-handedly. What prompted that?
I was speaking with the iwacs publisher. I had mentioned that i had been working on some new songs, which were instrumentation wise the same sort of thing as iwacs.

it wasnt meant to be ‘iwacs’ just a new band of mine.

I was meant to work on the tracks and try record some demos but really it came to nothing other than a few loops and a bad idea.

And so, what prompted the cancellation?
I am very indecisive, i was thinking about it racking my brain weather i could really force myself to play some iwacs material. I spoke to william about it and asked if he wantyed to do a few gigs maybe. then we didnt speak again, i dont think i could really do it.

So if you’d had a second album, what direction would it have taken?
like worker bees, i would of liked it to get bigger more layers more instrumentation. More ambient and drawn out ideas then 2 or three ideas in a 3 minute song.

Have you spoken to Will since your split?
Yes twice, hr told me he met kanye west and how crazy he was. Which doesnt surprise me. i hold no grudge now i am more than past it now. He was one of the few people out of all my old ‘band’ friends to wish me well with my baby and i really apreciated that.

How do you differentiate the Todd Marriott of 2012, to the one of 2007?
far less erratic and overemotional, much calmer, relaxed and often way to high.

Im sorry for my 5 month delay, it really made me think looking at these questions and for a long while i couldnt find an answer to some of them.

todd

Hamish McLachlan is an Australian sports broadcaster currently employed with the Seven Network...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 03:23:00 -0400

Hamish McLachlan is an Australian sports broadcaster currently employed with the Seven Network Austereo.

Well, that’s according to his Wikipedia page – the operative word being ‘his’. Hamish McLachlan, or ‘Rompingwins’, truly owns his Wikipedia page. Since his creation of the page in 2010, the article has been filled with valuable information. The current version has been downsized, so it’s a little bare. Thankfully, the full archive of McLachlan’s personal alterations are still readable.

Do you remember those kids in high school who were really bad at sport? They played everything, were obsessed with it, but were utterly hopeless. The tragedy was in their naivety: They didn’t realise their local footy club was a xenophobic boys club with extremely homosexual undertones. They loved sport so much, that they decided to make a ‘career’ out of it. They went to university, selecting one of the following out of a hypothetical hat: Sports science, sports management, journalism (with the hope of writing for the Herald Sun’s back pages), and any university degree where the dress code is shorts in winter. If you got them drunk enough, they’d tell you “I make myself feel better when I hang around with sportspeople!”. The thing is, they’d wake up, feel embarrassed, and try to avoid speaking to you again. Hamish, on the other hand, shows not an inkling of shame: He displays this sporting incompetency with pride. Onya, Hames!

Here’s an example of another fault. This time, a contradiction in terms: “Leading sporting event” and “Commonwealth Games”. Nice try, Macca.

For those of you who don’t know what the “AFL Hall of Fame and Sensation” was (which is likely a vast majority of even football fans), it was terrible. I never attended it, but then again, who did? Even poor football played in cerise jumpers on the Gold Coast lasted longer than this shit. From what I understand, it was like every piss weak world in Queensland: But, somehow, even worse. ‘Attractions’ included public humiliation: Which took the form of a booth in which you mimicked Dennis Cometti, before the fruits of your “centimetre perfect” labour would be played over a speaker; Futile handball competitions; And not much else. So to be fair to Hamish, this one wasn’t entirely his fault. But there remains an important question. Why would this career lowlight would be voluntarily included in, what is essentially, a resume? Only Rompingwings himself will ever know.

Ah, Hamish. What a guy, hey? I’m with you though, man. It shouldn’t be a taboo to tell the internet about your selfless philanthropy and charity work.

No further changes have been made to the page as the article is now locked. That means poor Hamish can’t add this anecdote to the article:

If you live in London, pick up the new issue of (This is Fake)...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:30:10 -0400

If you live in London, pick up the new issue of (This is Fake) DIY. You’ll not pay a cent (or, pent) to read my name physically printed in a high circulating magazine.

An Interview with DIIV (Part I)

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 09:08:00 -0400

DIIV (they used to be called Dive) is a Brooklyn based act, led by Zachary Cole Smith (a touring member of Beach Fossils). Devin Ruben Perez, Andrew Bailey, and Colby Hewitt make up the rest of the group. DIIV’s sound is atmospheric. It goes without saying, DIIV is a far cry from the breezy, summer tinged pop of Smith’s more prominent day job, Beach Fossils.

Debut single “Sometime” summates the aesthetic of DIIV. The song is drenched in reverb. Whilst a washed out, ringing guitar create a hazy, dense atmosphere. Despite the recollection of melancholia, the melodic power creates endearing and eloquent. Subsequently, it stuttered it’s reverb-drenched mien onto the pages of Pitchfork, where it received the flattering tag of Best New Track.

Since that debut release in October 2011, just a few more samples of DIIV’s music has been released. But the promise and consistency of each track has seen excitement build. Their first EP is slated for an early March release on cult label, Captured Tracks. I spoke to Z. Cole Smith about his latest project.

–––

According to your page on Captured Tracks, you holed up in a studio without running water, nor air conditioning, and you faced a window and crafted music. Why write in such a barren way?

Ha, the decision to write that way wasn’t so much an artistic decision as a financial necessity. Renting actual apartments in NYC is so crazy expensive that some of the more resourceful types find places to live that are slightly cheaper; storage units, abandoned warehouse spaces, and in my case, an art studio. You get used to not having a shower or a kitchen after a few weeks and find ways around day-to-day stuff like that. But in a lot of ways it helped me focus on music in a way that would be impossible any other way. Zero distractions, fewer financial woes, etc. It really was an immersive experience.

It makes sense for the industrial, echoed sounds of Dive to have that kind of beginning. Was there much stylistic variation in the results of those recordings, or was Dive a natural product of your conditions and frame of mind?

Dive’s genesis really was as a sound first and foremost. There has been tons of stylistic variation in my personal home-recordings, but the recordings that eventually became Dive were just a lot of ideas filtered through a certain sonic palette that occurred pretty naturally, partly due to my environment, yeah.

Both DIIV and Beach Fossil’s lyrics have evidently personal meanings. But for DIIV, it seems almost like a mantra. The lyrics for “Sometime” sound like a stream of consciousness version of that. What’s the lyrical background and inspiration for DIIV, and how do you usually write?

Yeah, that’s well said. There is something Mantra-like about both the lyrics and the music of Sometime, how the song starts and then basically repeats itself twice verbatim; same exact music, same exact lyrics. That was the intention with that song and it is the intention with one or two other DIIV songs, “Big Joke” is a song that’s out that shares that concept. What DIIV lyrics I have now and are working on for this record are deeply personal and very existential and I’ve taken comfort, with the first few releases, in the fact that they are pretty obscured by reverb/delay, etc. but I think hiding the personal elements of who is making this music really deprives it of something that’s a very important part of the listening experience.

How would you describe the EP? Musically or otherwise.

Well, I’ve since scrapped the idea for an EP and am finishing up a full-length record in the next month or so. But it’s not recorded yet so I can’t comment on how it sounds, but I guess I can say the album’s intention is to be a careful hybrid of our kind of manic live sound and the very deliberate, much darker sound of my home-recordings thus-far.

The name is much like other shoegaze bands: One word (Adorable, Curve, Ride, Slowdive, and countless more). How did you come up with the (fitting) pseudonym and what does it mean to you?

Yeah, those names were definitely an influence. I definitely wanted a short name, a four-letter word. The name “Dive” comes from the Nirvana song of the same name, but I actually got it from the pages of Kurt’s journal, I just loved the way the word looked in his handwriting. In some ways I feel like Kurt’s song is about this band. Devin explained it to me on an acid trip. We are all water signs and there’s a strong water element to the band as well.

Andrew Bailey was a childhood friend whilst Colby Hewitt was once in Smith Westerns. How did they become members of Dive?

I guess just through happenstance, I don’t really know.

For most acts, having a physical release should see a Google search inundated with band information. Yet DIIV’s internet presence is relatively scarce. Do you think this could alter your attempt at gaining attraction?

I kind of love having a band name that’s impossible to search for on Google; I remember when Girls came out and I thought that was so cool, you know? To not be so desperate for everybody to just be able to find you right away, they gotta look.

Apart from your EP, what up with 2012 for you dudes?

Dreams come true.

I asked Palmistry Some Questions

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 23:42:00 -0500

And he answered them…

I wrote about Palmistry’s debut song, and its wonderful and dense video, for This is Fake DIY. I fell in love with the inundation of atmosphere in the track. Needless to say, his aesthetic and musical prowess has teed up excitement. His woozy, late-night electronics inspire a yearning for late night walks. And the soulful yearnings of past love are so well delivered, it almost makes heartbreak beautiful.

So to help me flesh out my blog, I asked him some boringly stock questions. So it transpires, he was once an online poker play. I should have asked him if he’d ever played against Shane Warne or Teddy Sheringham. But Instead, I quizzed him about music and ambitions. Boring, right?

“Night Truths” is very dense and atmospheric. The accompanying video just enhances this. Is atmosphere an important element for you in music?
Definitely. I spent a few years trying to create “soundscapes” with field recordings and I was just into making ambient and drone inspired pieces.

What are your main musical influences?
In the last year I’ve been listening to a lot classic old school UK Garage mixes and classic grime like Ruff Sqwad. But the likes of The Dream / Terius Nash, Arvo Paart are a staple of my listening.

I’m still really drawn to sampling field recordings.

How do you think London, both in its electronic music and its lifestyle, has altered Palmistry?
London’s fast pace has definitely fuelled a desire to retreat into isolation and record music. But [London] has also inspired the Palmistry project, just by the diversity of culture and mix of interesting people living here.

London has been a great place for pushing new threads of electronic music. Sick labels like Hyperdub and Nightslugs are putting out a lot of my favourite records.

What’s your live set up like? Or, how do you hope to assemble a live show?
At the moment it’s not much of a setup. I just focus on vocal performances and fx with a laptop but eventually I want it to be a genuine live performance with maybe one other person on an MPC. Then I’d just do vocals and some other minimal shit on a sampler.

I wouldn’t want to turn it into a standard band thing – that would be really boring for me. But yeah, theres quite a few things that need to be explored to really turn it into a genuine live experience.

What do you hope to accomplish through your music?
On a personal level I just want to make something I would be really proud of, like make a minor masterpiece one day and if people dig it then that would be cool. In the bigger picture, If I was able to fully focus all my time on just making music, that’d be bless.

There’s little information about Palmistry on the internet. Although this might flatter your ethereal music, is there anything people should know, that they perhaps don’t?
Nothing that exciting, but before I was spending my life making music with a computer I used to put in the same amount of hours playing online poker. Sleeping all day to compensate for the American time zones for tournaments, winning and losing equal amounts of money.

One night I saw a friend lose 10 grand. He’d built it up over a few years [and lost it] in one night. Thats when I took my foot off the gas and ended my dreams of being the next crackpot pokerkid of the world – like Matt Damon in that movie Rounders.

What are your plans for the remainder of 2012?
Hopefully I’ll release an EP. That’s nearly finished and good to go. And I also wanna drop a mixtape later in the year called ‘Chung & Dangerous’.

Thanks for the interest Kyle.

Palmistry, like the rest of middle class western civilisation, has a Facebook page.